St Augustine's School

We were lucky enough as a year group, to be invited to Outwood Portland, to experience and astronomy event. This is great for us as our next topic is going to be all about space!

We learned lots of information about space and about our solar system, The Milky way. We learned all about the size of the planets and the sun! We learned how telescopes work and even what comets are made from. We EVEN got to make our own comet! It was so amazing and interesting. We THEN got to make ice cream! It was great fun.

Spruce class have started a gymnastic topic in PE. We looked at ways of movement and travelling and the different levels of doing this. We then put them into a routine and to the beat of music and then we performed then to other groups, to give each other constructive criticism.

We are currently creating an animal branching database in year 5. We were able and lucky enough to go into the school’s wildlife garden and search for animals and also, look at habitats and what kinda of animals would live in those habitats.

We found:

frogsspidersflieswoodlice birdsbeeswormscentipedes and lots more.

After we had been outside to look, we came back in and played 21 questions in our learning partners to help us identify how to separate these animals using closed questions. This helped us when we started to create our branching database.

Today, year 5 were lucky enough to take a trip to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park! We had such an amazing time and were able to see all the different animals that we wouldn’t normally get to see.

What is your favourite animal?

We even had the opportunity to take part in a workshop at the park, where we looked at the animals and their adaptations for the habitats that they live in. We even got the chance to hold some of these animals in oder to get a close up look at their adaptations.

Can you remember their adaptations and why they had these adaptations?

We were lucky enough to partake in the Harvest festival. In year 5 we created abstract harvest theme boards, in small groups. We used pastels, which we smudged, to create the abstract effect. We chose to draw pictures that were relevant to the harvest, such as, pumpkins, and leaves falling from the trees. We chose to use colours at were also autumn themed (reds, yellows, oranges, greens, browns etc).

We also learned and performed the song “Thank you Lord”. We did this acapella. It was scary but we had great fun and loved every minute!

In year 5 we have been looking at deforestation and it’s effects on the world. We researched the for and against deforestation and we had written a balanced argument using what we found out. We also held a debate in the hall, like the MPs would in the houses of Parliament.

For

Room for communities and townsMedicine Wood for paper

Against

Habitats are being destroyed Animals are becoming endangered Oxygen is need from trees for us to breathe

Can you state some of the other arguments in the comments below?

We decided after our balanced argument and debate to conduct an experiment; to see how deforestation affects land slides around the world. In the first tray we created a slope of mud and placed paper houses at the bottom, we then poured water on to the top of the mud slope to see what would happen. In the second tray, we created the same mud slope, with houses at the bottom, but this time we placed twigs and sticks in the slope at the top and bottom. WE then poured water (just like in the first tray) to see what the difference was.

Can you guess what happened? Can you remember what happened year 5 (comment below)? Can you explain why it happened?

In year 5, today we moved on to dividing by 10, 100 or 1000s using some apparatus to help us.

We found sharing out the apparatus really useful, as it helped us see that in order to divide by 10 we have to share the apparatus out in 10 groups. We also found that when dividing by 10, all we have to do is move the numbers down one place in the place value chart.